Print and book collector, wrote major inventory of prints.

Book dealer and architectural historian. Nagler earned his doctorate from the Universität Erlangen in 1829. Through his research at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, he completed his first major scholarly reference publication, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon (1835-52). It took Nagler seventeen years, scrupulously delivering a manuscript every month to his printer, E.A. Fleischmann, in Munich. Comprehensive art dictionaries and encyclopedias were only then being written. Scholars had mixed feelings about such works.

Describes and discusses art in books 34-36 of Historia Naturalis. Using a biomorphic paradigm to describe artistic development, Pliny uses a birth/development/decline method to art which would be highly influential for the art methodology of the middle ages and renaissance. In this sense he carries on the legacy of Xenokrates influencing as late a scholar as Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Pliny avoided discussing works of art as isolated examples of history.